One terrorist group is responsible for more civilian deaths since December 2012 (the Sandy Hook massacre) than Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and the Taliban. Yet it is the only nearly-state sponsored terrorist group that is not listed by the U.S. State Department as such.

It is the National Rifle Association and for their unending lobbying that’s kept a lid on gun control we now have 428 times more American deaths by gun than deaths by foreign terrorists.

As if this display of mental infirmity isn’t enough, watch how Linda Stasi attempts to justify her lunacy.

No? Between 2012 and 2015, according to University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, ISIS has murdered approximately 12,138 civilians, Boko Haram,10,092, the Taliban 9,427 and Hamas, 85.

In that time, Americans have murdered or spree killed via gun and assault rifle, 87,423 people in the United States.

In contrast, terrorism killed 28 Americans per year on both U.S. soil and abroad according to the Global Terrorism Database.

Those murdered Americans killed by our own lunatic gun slingers include terrified children calling for their mothers, teachers begging for the lives of their students, students begging for not just their own lives but the lives of their classmates, moviegoers looking for escape, bystanders cheering for athletes, athletes trying to be the best they can be as the worst we ever could have imagined struck them down in cold blood.

Stasi doesn’t explain how she gets the staggering total of 87,423 people “murdered or spree killed via gun or assault rifle,” and that’s because she can’t.

The FBI has not released the final 2014 Unified Crime Report for 2014, but stated that violent crime of all kinds was down six-percent from the same time period in 2013.

The FBI is a year or more out from releasing the 2015 data.

If we merely took the worst of the full years documented (2013, with 8,855 murders committed with a firearm) and multiplied it times 4 to cover the 2012-2015 time frame Stasi claims to cover, we come up with a total 35,420 people murdered with firearms, or just 40.5% of what Stasi claimed.

Using that same “worst known times four” methodology, we end up just 1,288 were killed by rifles of all kinds over four year, and so-called “assault rifles” are just some fraction of that figure, likely numbering less than a total of thousand deaths over four years.

Put bluntly, Linda Stasi is using a combination of grossly exaggerated, falsified and unknowable data (the FBI hasn’t released the 2014 crime report, much less 2015), and then makes the huge logical jump of taking that grossly exaggerated, falsified and unknowable data and ascribing collectively to the nation’s oldest civil rights group and world’s largest firearms safety training organization without a shred of evidence tying the two together.

When news organizations hire opinion writers, they give them a certain degree of latitude to make their editorial points. The fact-checking is typically sloppy in many editorials as a result.

Unfortunately, Stasi’s unhinged rant goes far beyond merely being sloppy to apparently manufacturing false statistics that she then used to smear the National Rifle Association without a shred of evidence linking the NRA to the grossly exaggerated, falsified and unknowable data.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not a lawyer, but I do have a moral center.

Grossly falsifying data, then attempting to link that falsified data to a targeted group without any evidence at all is what I think is likely libelous, and is certainly beyond the realm of editorial license.

The New York Daily News must issue an immediate retraction of Stasi’s defamatory editorial, apologize to the more than five million members of the National Rifle Association, and terminate Linda Stasi and the editors who let this calculated smear go to print.

You’re entitled to your own opinion, New York Daily News.

You are not entitled to fabricate a false reality, then use it to smear one of the most law-abiding segments of society.

Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com.
Bob is a graduate of roughly 400 hours of professional firearms training classes, including square range and force-on force work with handguns and carbines. He is a past volunteer instructor with Project Appleseed. He most recently received his Vehicle Close Quarters Combat Instructor certification from Centrifuge Training, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun.
He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.
https://bearingarms.com/author/bobowens-bearingarms/